- Person
- Robert F. Furchgott
- Lived
- 1916–2009
- Field
- Pharmacology
- From
- American
The story
Robert Furchgott, chairman of pharmacology at the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, had spent decades studying how drugs make blood vessels contract and relax. In May 1978, in the first experiment of a new study, a technician’s error produced a strip of rabbit aorta that relaxed when exposed to acetylcholine instead of contracting as expected. Furchgott, then 62, set out to find out why.
The answer lay in the endothelium, the thin layer of cells lining every blood vessel, which the usual way of preparing artery strips tended to damage. In 1980 he showed that acetylcholine relaxed blood vessels only if the endothelium was intact. He concluded that the endothelial cells release an unknown messenger that makes the muscle of the vessel wall relax, and he named it endothelium-derived relaxing factor, or EDRF.
EDRF was so short-lived that identifying it became a scientific hunt. Ferid Murad had shown in 1977 that nitroglycerin and related drugs work by releasing nitric oxide, a simple gas. In 1986 Furchgott and Louis Ignarro, independently, concluded that EDRF was nitric oxide. When they presented their findings in July 1986, the Nobel Assembly later wrote, it set off an avalanche of research. It was the first discovery that a gas can act as a signalling molecule in the body.
The finding explained why nitroglycerin, used for more than a century against angina, works: the body turns it into nitric oxide, which widens the arteries. Nitric oxide was found to regulate blood pressure, prevent clots, carry nerve signals and help white blood cells fight infection. Inhaled nitric oxide gas is used to treat dangerously high blood pressure in the lungs of newborn babies, measurement of nitric oxide in breath helps diagnose asthma, and sildenafil, which acts on the nitric oxide pathway, treats erectile dysfunction and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Why it matters
Furchgott’s discovery of nitric oxide signalling explains how heart drugs like nitroglycerin work and underlies treatments used today in heart disease, newborn intensive care and pulmonary hypertension.
About Robert F. Furchgott
Charleston-born pharmacologist who found that blood vessel linings release a relaxing signal, nitric oxide, explaining nitroglycerin and leading to new treatments. Nobel Prize 1998.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1998 NobelPrize.org
- Robert F. Furchgott, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Robert F. Furchgott Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.